Two weeks ago today Amelie Cook was born. (Yay, everyone doing well. Trish, who is getting much better at the whole giving birth thing, took only four hours this time compared to 30 the first time around).

We actually locked in her name a few months ago. The first person to know about it was Nick, our IT ninja. Why did we tell Nick first you ask? What is so special about Nick that he heard before our parents?

Yep, you guessed it, because the first thing we did after agreeing on her name was to buy ameliecook.com.

If you’re a thought leader, the URL of your name is some valuable real estate. If you have an unusual name it might not be that hard to get. But if your name is something like Peter Cook, you’re in a world of trouble.

Peter Cook is also an ex-Australian Senator, a Melbourne Cup winning jockey, and the late Peter Cook partnered Dudley Moore for some of the best comedy work ever. Which of course meant that every second teacher in high school felt the need to say “and you must be Dudley Moore” to whoever happened to be standing next to me on the first day of class.

There was even a funny incident last year where a Peter Cook in England accused me of trying to steal his books on Amazon after an administrative error in Amazon HQ meant they ended up on my author page.

Over a decade ago when I tried to register petercook.com, it was already set up as a fan page. Unfortunately not to me, but to the comedian Peter Cook.

For ten years I tracked the URL, waiting to see if it became available. And after ten years, and after the untimely death of Peter Cook (again, the comedian, not me), the fan page people decided not to renew the URL. And so it went to auction.

I had Trish’s approval to spend up to $5,000 to buy it, but I actually figured I’d go to $10,000 if I needed to. I ended up winning the auction for $240.

I waited 10 years and would have spent $10k, which lets you know how valuable I think it is for my practice. And I registered Amelie’s URL before she was even born.

If you don’t have yourname.com and it’s available, get it. Today!

(Just go to Godaddy.com or any other similar site, have a look, and pay $10 a year if it’s there.) If not, get as close as you can (put a hyphen in, use a middle initial, your middle name, or something). And if you can’t get anything close, it might be time to consider changing your name.

I was recently debriefing with a friend about a sales meeting where the potential client didn't buy. Apparently it was a great meeting but at the end they said they would try to do the work themselves and didn't need my client's help.

It's a very familiar situation to me – I can see that they would really benefit from what I'm offering, but somehow they don't.